TBH I agree, AE autocrafting never had the grand feeling of having hundreds of Autocrafting tables hooked up to LP. Mind you, the one reason people in the MPT had to re-add it, was that it was a while since we last had it on the server. So as far as we know, it could have gotten better; But it's all up in the air until they get it on alice and have it tested large scale.
I don't really see why its AE's time to leave the server to be honest. Yes its easy but thats good because those new to the modded minecraft scene can pick it up quickly unlike the more complex mods.
^ Guess who didn't even bother reading the poll options. Storage buses are "partitioned" , so I'd guess that AE doesn't even have to check what's in the chest, it already knows it because it can simply keep track of the items it puts into it or pulls from it. So even if you have like 200 chests with storage buses it probably wouldn't strain the server much as there are no constant queries. Feel free to correct me, I dunno much about the server-side stuff.
That's not how AE works suchtie. You can use a decompiler like jd if you want to see how AE actually does things.
I can't java though. I tend to understand code if it's not too complicated but this is most likely not the case here.
AE has to check things because if AE can interact with it, players can, meaning it has to poll for random stuff getting in a chest, for example